Bryan Gruley: Starvation lake

“And how about the little boys, Jack?”

“You ungrateful little shit,” he said, thrusting his glass at me so hard that some whiskey slopped over the top. “I made you a goalie. You never would’ve started for the Rats-hell, you never would’ve made the team just to sit your ass on the bench-if it wasn’t for me. I was like a father to you. I had to be a goddamned saint, too?”

“I had a father. You were not my father.”

“Oh, listen, son, my daddy got hit by a train when I was six. He was stumbling around drunk in the dark and it came up out of nowhere and knocked him to Nova Scotia. So be it. All good things come to an end.” He took a long swallow of whiskey. “I’m glad you brought your daddy up, though, since you think you know so much, I’m sure you know all about the Friday night poker games then, eh?”

“I know-”

“You know zip. For your information, those games were going on a hell of a long time before I got to town. And there wasn’t a lot of poker either. The main attraction was your dear old dad-the late, great Rudy Carpenter and his late, great movie projector. Sometimes I’d even make popcorn. It wasn’t poker night; it was poke-her night. Get it? Poke her?” He jabbed a forefinger at the air. “That was quite a crew-old Lenny Ziolkowski, Angus, Jerry. And your old man. That projector of his made a hell of a racket, but the pictures were”-he looked up at the ceiling, as if seeking inspiration-“exquisite.”

He stopped and watched me, savoring my discomfort, then picked up the whiskey bottle, filled half of the other glass, and pushed it along the table toward me.

“Sorry, son,” he said. “This film business was doing just fine before I arrived in Starvation. They had a healthy little network of flicks moving around the state, some coming up from the South, a few as far out as Iowa. A nice little market. But it was mostly run-of-the-mill stuff, you know, guys and chicks, chicks and dogs, same old same old. It was getting difficult to-what would the Wall Street Journal say? — differentiate the product. I saw an opportunity and was able to, as they say, leverage it for a more profitable market niche. Because, whether you like it or not, there’s huge demand for that stuff out there. Huge.”

“It’s child pornography. It’s perverted and illegal.”

“Illegal if you get caught. And the rest, well, it really ain’t for me or you to judge. You know, in hockey, you play the puck where it goes, not where you think it ought to go. Business is no different. Where there’s demand, there’s going to be supply, so you might as well supply, because people are going to get it anyway, one way or the other, just like they get their guns and cigarettes and heroin and”-he jiggled his glass-“this. Sure, my heating-and-cooling business was for shit because everybody and his brother up there was selling furnaces. Too much supply. So I found something with lots of demand and not much supply, at least not then. But remember, Gus, it takes a team to succeed. One guy can screw everything up-you ought to know that, eh? — but it takes a bunch of people working together to succeed. I had a good idea, but I had no money. And it doesn’t matter how good your idea is, you don’t have money, you’re going nowhere. Which brings us back to your daddy.”

“My dad had no interest in your disgusting business.”

“You know, it’s really too bad old Rudy isn’t still around, because now we’ve got the Internet. Supply is so much more efficient. And demand is unlimited. Unlimited, Gus. And it’s never going to stop.”

“You’re lying.”

“I don’t know where he came up with the money either. But your dad was obviously a pretty determined guy.” He leaned forward in his chair. He grinned. “You don’t actually take after him, do you, Gus?”

My father had wanted a Cadillac, if only just for Sunday drives to Lake Michigan. For years he saved to buy one. But when he finally had enough money, he chose instead to buy a used Bonneville so he could put the rest of the money into an investment. What investment? A retirement fund? My college education? Anything, I hoped, but Blackburn’s “opportunity.” Not my father. Even if he had misled my mother about where he worked those Saturday nights, it was only because of the looming death sentence of his cancer and the duty he felt to make sure Mom and I were cared for.

“You’re a goddamn liar.”

“You don’t have to believe me,” Blackburn said. He sat back again and lifted his glass to his lips. “Ask your mother.”

“Fucking liar!” I leaped from my chair, knocking the table over and sending my untouched drink flying. I slapped his glass out of his hands and it shattered against the table hockey game. “This is not about my mother and father,” I yelled, “this is about you and all the kids you fucked over. You’re going to jail or I can take you out right here.”

I was hovering over him now, breathing hard, heart pumping, fists clenched. I wanted to rip Blackburn’s face off from the ears.

He didn’t move. “Take me out?” he said. “Starvation ain’t enough of a jail for you? What are you really going to do, Gus? You want to hit me? Go ahead. See what difference it makes in your life or mine.”

“It’s over. It’s over now.”

“That’s right!” he shouted, and before I could react, he bolted up straight in his chair and grabbed my shirt collar and yanked me down close to him. I struggled to free myself as hairy knuckles scraped my neck and liquor breath slithered up my nose. “That’s right, boy,” he snarled. “It’s over. Right…now!” In one motion he raised himself out of the chair and with a grunt from his belly flung me back against the wall. I righted myself and braced for him to charge, but he just stood there looking at me and gasping for breath. He leaned over and picked the bottle, unscrewed the cap, and took a long slug. Finished, he wiped his mouth with the back of one hand and let the bottle fall to his side.

“You know,” he said, “it could’ve been you. It could’ve been you and not the others. You didn’t see me over at Swanny’s when he was a squirt teaching him how to play the game, did you? But that’s the way you wanted it, or your mother wanted it, and now, here we are. You got away, I got away.” He took another swig from the bottle. “Now go home. Nobody knows you were here. Go home to your mommy. Let your father rot in peace.”

“My dad would spit in your face.”

“Yeah? Well, we’re done here. I’m calling the cops.”

He took the bottle into his office. I heard the beeps of numbers being punched into a phone.

I crossed Blackburn’s front lawn at a slow trot and hurried down the sidewalk to the Bonnie, relieved to have the cover of dark. I kept my headlights off until I was out of the neighborhood, where I pulled into a strip mall lot, parked, and wrote down everything I could remember.

The cop flashers blinked in my rearview mirror about an hour northwest of Pittsburgh. A tow truck dispatched the Bonnie while two Lawrence County sheriff’s deputies ferried me to the Ohio border, where they stopped and took me out of their car and ushered me to the backseat of a Mahoning County sheriff’s cruiser. None of the cops said much. Every hour or so, we’d stop and I’d be moved to a different car as one county sheriff handed me over to another and another until we pulled over at the southern border of Michigan. Through the windshield I saw two Monroe County sheriff’s cruisers, one from Pine County, and a burly officer wearing an earflap cap and puffing on a thin brown cigar.

“You know a lot of sheriffs,” I said.

We’d driven about half an hour into Michigan, Dingus at the wheel, me in the back. It was nearly three o’clock Friday morning.